Monday, October 10, 2022

Weekend Wrap

Sunday included the first frost delay of the season, so winter is on.  That used to be a far more exciting prospect for your humble blogger, but that's not important now.

The Legend of Tom Kim - I did watch some of the early coverage, flipping over during commercial breaks in the Dallas-Rams, but didn't see any of the concluding action.  It's for sure hard to win out there, though we can all likely agree that it's not quite as hard as Patrick Cantlay made it seem:

It took Tom Kim until the final regular season event of the 2021-22 season to nab his first PGA Tour win.

He wasted no time backing up that victory in his first start of the 2022-23 season.

Coming into the final round of the Shriners Children’s Open tied with a red-hot Patrick Cantlay for the lead, Kim fired a final-round-66 to finish at 24 under for the week and claim the title. The only thing Kim failed to do all week: make a bogey.

The win makes him the second youngest two-time PGA Tour winner since Ralph Guldahl in 1932 and the youngest international two-time winner since 1900, according to stat guru Justin Ray. The last player to win twice before their 21st birthday was Tiger Woods.

I haven't really come to a conclusion as to how good a player he is, though two wins, even given the depleted fields, gets your attention.  Not to mention that Prez Cup star turn, although by those standards Victor Dubuisson should be atop the OWGR, so perhaps a deep breath is the ticket.

So, what befell Patrick?  Well, just about everything:

Cantlay, who made the event his first of eight PGA Tour titles when he won in 2017, had
struggled early in the final round after sharing the 54-hole lead with Kim, making two bogeys offset by two birdies over the first eight holes. But with five birdies in his next eight, Cantlay found himself tied again with Kim at 24 under heading to the par-4 finishing hole at TPC Summerlin.

Using a 3-wood off the tee after having hit nine of 13 fairways during the round, Cantlay saw his good fortune run out when the ball turned harder to the left than he hoped. It eventually found an ugly place underneath a desert bush 162 yards from the hole, leaving a lie that on-course reporter Arron Oberholser quickly reported was too bad to play a recovery shot from back to the fairway.

You'll know what's coming, still it's hard to fault his logic:

Yet given the circumstances—Kim’s ball was safely in the fairway 123 yards from the green—Cantlay decided he needed to take the gamble. When in Vegas!

“I figured the only chance I had to stay in the tournament was to try to get it back in the fairway,” Cantlay said. “Obviously I couldn't get it back in the fairway.”

For those that like train wrecks, here's the video:

he really didn't have any viable options there, or so it seems from the video.  He did make a 35-footer to hold onto a T2.

Scenes From The Class Struggle - Having spent some time with the proletariat in the desert, shall we check in with the gilded class in Bangkok?

James Colgan apparently discovered something your humble blogger picked up on back in 2001 when, executing Greg Norman's vision for a world tour, they took the WGC Match Play event to Royal Melbourne, and nobody went (that Steve Stricker - Pierre Fulke final still sends a thrill up Tim Finchem's leg):

LIV Bangkok proves a truly ‘global’ tour is a double-edged sword

On Sunday afternoon in Bangkok, Eugenio Lopez-Chicarra — a 22-year-old Spanish-born pro — won his first-ever LIV Golf event.

It was a blowout win for Chicarra, the kind the folks at LIV have undoubtedly been waiting to see for some time now. Chicarra is one of the youngest members of an uber-talented crew of twenty-somethings for LIV — a group that league hopes will form the glut of its future core. His victory checked a few more boxes for LIV, representing a grand introduction to a foreign market and providing Chicarra’s team, the Fireballs, with their first-ever team win. In a rare feat for the upstarts, Chicarra’s $4.7 million winner’s check was not the main story, but only the cherry on top of a very sweet Sunday.

That is, if you were awake to see it.

The bars weren’t open in New York City when Chicarra’s final putt hit the bottom of the cup at 4:25 a.m. local time. Even the city that never sleeps had opted for shuteye. The ones out on the west coast, where it was 1:25 a.m., were prepping for last call. In London, where LIV hosted its first event, Chicarra’s win might have interrupted breakfast.

Sounds like a dreadful result for the LIVsters, who are bloviating about the strength of their fields in other contexts, yet deliver a winner that can only confirm the importance of the depth of fields, because when you're limited to forty-eight players, you don't have room for the rest of these up-and-comers.

But, James, what is this crew of twenty-somethings of which you speak?  To steal from Tom Lehrer, the average age of the LIV field is, checking notes, dead for three years.

These were expected outcomes, of course. LIV knew that bringing its tour to the other side of the world would blunt its signal with fans. This, after all, is what happens every time the PGA Tour heads to Europe for the DP World Tour or the Open Championship, or what happens each week for PGA Tour fans abroad who tune in at weird hours to see their favorite players.

“This is a global tour,” Sergio Garcia crooned in the wake of Chicarra’s win Sunday. “It’s not a Tour that is in the U.S., not a Tour that is in Europe. This is a global tour.”

To that end, he’s right. LIV is a global tour, but not everything that comes with a global tour is good for business. The viewing numbers and tepid interest represent also the other side of it, where the big, ambitious vision begins to run counter to any league’s primary business strategy: to best serve its fans. This comes at a time of particular business intrigue for the upstarts, who face a series of business decisions in the coming months that could significantly alter their long-term viability.

Fans?  Did they actually allow ans in, because it's not immediately obvious from the pictures I've seen:

Well, Jerry Foltz!  Yeah, there's a delusional strain in the hype that would be amusing in a different context.   

OWGR Maneuvers - Did someone say delusional?  I don't have to dig especially deep to mock them, all I really need to say is MENA Tour....  Yeah, Greg, that was a good one.  No great way to dro into this story, so let's just start with the Tour Confidential panel's take on all things MENA:

One day after LIV Golf announced a strategic alliance with the MENA Tour in the hopes of earning immediate world ranking points, the OWGR said it paused the league’s bid for them. A review of the changes is now underway. “I don’t think it really was much of a
response,” Brooks Koepka said. “I just hate when you sit on the fence. Just pick a side. If it’s yes or no, just pick one.” Are you surprised by the decision, and how much of a setback is this for LIV?

Josh Sens: This was like my patented heel-slice off the 1st tee: you could see it coming. I can’t imagine LIV was surprised. This felt more like an attempt by LIV to test around the edges and get a response out of the tight-lipped OWGR. Also quite possibly part of a longer-term legal strategy — evidence they might point to later to make a case that they’ve been treated unfairly. I don’t think LIV expected this end-around to work in the short run.

James Colgan: Doesn’t matter how nice the suit is if you weren’t invited to the wedding in the first place. This felt a bit like switching your tie at the last second in the hopes the bouncer will let you through the door.

Jack Hirsh: Not surprised at this at all. I have to agree with Josh here, if LIV Golf thought this was going to work … I don’t even know what to think. I guess why didn’t they try to do this earlier with their affiliation with the Asian Tour?

Dylan Dethier: I don’t think it’s a huge setback, but I think it’s still hard to get a full read on LIV’s attempt here. Was this aggression? Desperation? Laying the groundwork for future legal moves? I think LIV’s only risk here is a shot to its legitimacy — but perhaps they got an accelerated OWGR ruling in return.

I can only assume that this is part of a lawfare strategy, because I can't see any other logic that explains it.  Though Greg and his cabal seems to have a very high threshold for beclowning themselves, because don't they look a little foolish right now?  

We lost Peter Alliss back in 2020, and I'm a bit surprised that someone is still running his Twitter account, but this is spot on:

The provenance of Steve Flesch's Twitter account is far clearer, and he had this similar take:

It's quite amusing, no?  They're quite full of themselves as "disruptors", which I suppose makes sense, but then they seem quite shocked when those whose milkshakes are being drunk don't capitulate.  

But, faced with complex issues, I know I invariably turn to Bryson DeChambeau.  While I could handle the defenestration, it so happens that Eamon Lynch already has:

Who could have imagined that a low-speed collision with a gallery rope would occasion a loss of critical faculty? But then, that presumes Bryson DeChambeau had a firm grasp on logic or fact
before he banjoed himself in front of tens of spectators at a recent LIV tournament in Chicago. If nothing else, the resulting viral video finally brought eyeballs to the LIV product, and perhaps some comfort to its CEO to see someone else suffer an embarrassing choke inside the ropes.

The discombobulated DeChambeau didn’t seem to have all synapses firing at LIV’s latest event for guys who want to spend more time at home, this one held in Thailand, a dozen time zones from his bed in Texas. He was angered that the Official World Golf Ranking declined to award points to LIV’s Bangkok stop within 24 hours of the Saudi-funded enterprise announcing an alliance with the near-defunct MENA Tour, which is recognized by the OWGR but hasn’t actually staged a tournament in more than two years.

“They’re delaying the inevitable. We’ve hit every mark in their criteria, so for us not to get points is kind of crazy … we have the top players in the world … we deserve to be getting world ranking points,” DeChambeau said, with an air of entitlement more befitting a Crown Prince than one of his play things.

OK, that's a pretty good Norman slam in that first 'graph....

Of course, Bryson has picked up that Normanesque aversion to the truth, because they haven't hit any of the marks, have they?

In many cases, they seem to have intentionally avoided the marks, although this is admittedly not quite as black-and-white as any of us would like.  

LIV’s existing structure falls short of many of the conventions long-established for tours to qualify for world ranking points. Let’s leave aside the first requirement — embracing inclusion and promoting non-discrimination, a formidable impediment for misogynistic bonesaw enthusiasts and their apologists. On rules around format, cuts and average field sizes over the course of a season, LIV is non-compliant. Nor are LIV events accessible via a legitimate qualification process, since entry is determined largely by Greg Norman’s use of MBS’s checkbook. Defenders will point to LIV’s proposed relegation system but that is meritless since some players are contractually exempt from being demoted, regardless of performance.

Tours must be compliant with OWGR standards for a year before ranking points will be awarded, but LIV has shown no intent to become so. Instead, Norman has adopted a strategy popular with his puppeteers: insist that established rules don’t apply, allege that the application of said rules amounts to unfair and discriminatory treatment, and launch a bot-driven misinformation campaign to create a deceitful narrative of a conspiracy.

Yes, relegation is a straw man, and there's also a process involved, though that seems to have come as quite the surprise to Mr. Norman.

I've got more  this subject, including so snark from Geoff, but I'm also running up against the clock.  I'll leave you here and pick up at this juncture tomorrow, is that acceptable to you .  Also if it's not acceptable, though you're an agreeable lot.

 

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